After winning one title since John Wooden, how much blue is left in UCLA’s blood?

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UCLA coach John Wooden wears a basketball net around his neck after his team won the 1975 NCAA championship. UCLA won 10 national titles in Wooden’s final 12 seasons, but the Bruins have won just one since his tenure. (Associated Press)

Grainy game footage and yellowed newspaper clippings confer UCLA’s standing as college basketball royalty, the team’s status as a blue blood rooted in the success of a coach who retired nearly 50 years ago.

John Wooden’s 10 national championships in a 12-year span are more than any other program has won in its history. On the flip side, the Bruins have won just one championship since Wooden’s departure, Jim Harrick’s 1995 team preventing the school from going 0 for the last half century.

UCLA’s Ed O’Bannon celebrates after the Bruins won the 1995 national championship game. (Associated Press)

North Carolina, the fellow blue blood that the Bruins will face Saturday afternoon at Madison Square Garden in the CBS Sports Classic, has won five of its six titles since 1982. By comparison, the bulk of UCLA’s success can feel like something accomplished on peach baskets.

As the years pass, those banners hanging inside Pauley Pavilion fade like the memories of those championships. UCLA has gone 30 years without a title while 10 teams have added multiple banners to their collection over that same span. Has the fundamental power structure of the sport changed? Might the Bruins be on the verge of ceding their hallowed status, their blood no longer the deepest shade of blue?

“Hell no,” Marques Johnson, a member of Wooden’s final national championship team in 1975, said this week. “I just don’t think you give up that spot in terms of the prestige and elite-level claim that you deserve based on historically what you’ve done as a program.”

A blue blood, in Johnson’s view, is more of a historic honor than a contemporaneous one, belonging to teams that dominated the sport when it was gaining a foothold in the nation’s consciousness…

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Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/winning-one-title-since-john-113003640.html

Author : LA Times

Publish date : 2024-12-19 11:30:00

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